Son sided with poisoner Mom against Dad, D.A. says

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Nearly 20 years ago, Elizabeth Fuentes-Ortiz tried to kill her husband in Redwood City by poisoning his milkshake. She fled to Mexico with her 2-year-old son, Jonathan Ortiz, and wasn’t caught until 2000.

She is now in prison, and her son is fully grown and nursing a serious grudge against his father for helping to put her away, prosecutors say. He’s heading to trial for allegedly beating and knifing Gilbert Ortiz in separate attacks last year.

The strange saga began in March 1992, when Fuentes-Ortiz brought a McDonald’s hamburger and a milkshake to her husband while he was working at Toys R Us in Redwood City. She allegedly told him the shake might taste funny because it was filled with amino acids to help him build muscles.

In fact, the shake had been laced with Ortho Sevin, an insecticide. Ortiz went into convulsions 10 seconds after downing the concoction in the store’s break room, police say. His heart stopped, his liver failed, and he lapsed into a coma that lasted 11 days. But he survived and told police what had happened. By then, his wife had already made it to Mexico with little Jonathan in tow.

Eight years later, she was arrested near Guadalajara, but there was no sign of the boy. He turned up a few months later at the San Mateo County jail, where he and relatives went to visit his mother.

In 2002, Fuentes-Ortiz was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 13 years to life in prison. Now 41, she is serving her sentence at Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla (Madera County).

On June 25, 2010, Jonathan Ortiz, by now 20, stabbed his father, “screaming about what he had done to (Jonathan’s) mother,” said San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe. The son took the wounded man to the hospital, where Gilbert Ortiz “made up a story about being robbed at knife-point,” Wagstaffe said.

Then, on Oct. 17, Jonathan Ortiz attacked his father again, beating him, prosecutors said. The father again concocted a story that he had been attacked during a robbery, prosecutors said. But this time, a relative contacted Redwood City police Sgt. Kathryn Anderson, the original police investigator from 1992, and told her what really happened, Wagstaffe said.

Jonathan Ortiz claimed self-defense. On Friday, he pleaded not guilty to two charges of assault. He is jailed in lieu of $200,000 bail.